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Written by Arthur Miller, directed by Alan Dilworth. Until June 23 at the Young Centre for the Performing Arts, 50 Tank House Lane. soulpepper.ca or 416-866-8666

Over his 50-year career, Arthur Miller penned a number of plays that are considered among the Western world’s greats.

His “big four” are frequently revived: Philip Seymour Hoffman played Death of a Salesman’s Willy Loman in 2012, two years before his own untimely passing; Ivo van Hove’s stagings of A View From the Bridge and The Crucible won raves on Broadway this season; and the Stratford Festival’s new production of All My Sons opens next week.

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Reaching into the back catalogue, as Soulpepper has done with the little-known, one-act Incident at Vichy (1964), allows audiences to consider how Miller continued to worry away at certain themes and problems throughout much of his work: the struggle for personal responsibility in morally challenging times; the problem of evil; and the place of the individual in larger socio-political structures and events.

The play is somewhat formulaic in its approach to characterization, with certain figures serving as mouthpieces for political stances and world views, but Alan Dilworth’s bold approach to casting goes a good way toward creating a contemporary context in which it resonates anew.

The situation is a simple, chilling one: a number of men sit in a room in Vichy, France in 1942, waiting for German and French officials to check their papers. They slowly realize what nearly all of them have in common: they’re Jewish. While rumours are circulating about what’s happening to Jews in Poland and elsewhere, mass roundups have not yet begun: we witness the thin edge of the wedge of the horrors that the world now knows ensued.

The dynamic of the piece is of mounting tension as the men share information, fears and strategies, and their ranks gets smaller as one by one they are called into an interrogation booth; few return. Eventually, the piece turns into a debate about truth, responsibility and human nature between the wrongly detained Austrian nobleman Von Berg (Diego Matamoros) and the army captain-turned-psychiatrist Leduc (Stuart Hughes).

Dilworth’s cast is deeply — I might even argue, aggressively — multicultural. The volatile artist Lebeau is portrayed by Bahrain-born Peter Fernandes and the actor Monceau by Kawa Ada, born in Afghanistan. First Nations actor Meegwun Fairbrother plays a character described only as “Gypsy.” Black actors Roy Lewis and Marcel Stewart are a prisoner and a detective, respectively. While the point is underlined in the script that “Jews are not a race, you know. They can look like anybody,” naturalistic productions of this play would probably cast the prisoners and soldiers as white. That the role of an adolescent boy is played by Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster, a woman, further tugs the esthetic away from realism.

It seems clear this is not the problematic practice of colour-blind casting, in which actors’ ethnicities are meant to somehow become invisible (as if that were possible). Rather, Dilworth’s production invites us to consider the disconnect between the historically specific situation the play depicts and the multicultural reality on his stage. Doing so opens up some uncomfortable contemporary resonances: a group of ragged people waiting uneasily at a police checkpoint for their futures to be decided evokes, for this viewer, the current situation at Europe’s borders (it helps that Lorenzo Savioni’s set of ramshackle walls and Gillian Gallow’s simple costumes can read as both then and now).

Rather than girding up some spurious notion of shared humanity, This production reminds us that national, religious and ethnic differences (perceived or real) still keep the world more divided than united.

Dilworth appears to have advocated for psychological commitment in acting style and this felt like it was still settling for some actors on opening night. There was a sense early on that performers were not always fully listening or responding to each other physically. Gordon Hecht’s speechifying as the diehard socialist Bayard came across too much like rote recitation. And why we needed the stagey convention of the French speaking with their own Canadian inflections while the Germans and Austrians use accents is not clear.

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The production really finds its stride in the exchange between Matamoros’ and Hughes’ characters.

While its rejection of naturalistic conventions might have been pushed further, this production offers welcome food for thought.

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